A Little Hope...

Awwwwwwwww.......... 

Yup...here's the newest member of our little family. Her name is Hope.
I broke down, gave in, caved in...whatever you want to call it - I am a sucker!
My girls have been begging for a dog for years and I've managed to dodge this bullet for as long as possible. I swear raising a puppy is harder than raising a child and I've tried to explain that to my kids. But then we were in the pet store the other night and saw this little cutie and even I couldn't resist. I did pretty well when they told me that the dog was $750! For a dog? She doesn't even have papers (not that I need those, but for $750 bucks, you'd think they would at least keep up the pretense of her being valuable). I'm all about saving the dog from the pound - that's where we got our cat. But I sure fell in love with this little girl! I talked them down to $600 and then got my ex-husband to pay for it (he's a bigger sucker than me! ;) He started out by saying he would give me $400 towards the dog and then he saw the teary look in my daughter's eyes when she thought she couldn't get it. She gave us the speech about how of course she'll pick up after it, take it for walks, bathe it, feed it twice a day, train it to drive her to school...all the things a parent wants to hear. Her dad fell for it hard - she is such a daddy's girl! He finally said, "Okay, just go get the dog, and just try to get me a good deal on it!" She started to cry again, and when I asked her why she was crying, she said, "Because I'm so happy!" Awww...!! Then I look at her dad and his eyes were all teary, and I thought - SUCKER!!!

She sure is a cute little thing, but now I'm in for long nights, early mornings and chewed up stuff all over the house. I never realized how much stuff I leave laying around until I got her, and it's only been one day!

By the way, I don't know the first thing about training a dog, so I could use any advice anyone chooses to give. She's managed not to have any accidents in the house (we take her out like every five minutes!), but I know they're coming.

I'll keep you posted on little Hope's progress!

Hmmmmmm....

I heard a great story once along the lines of Indecent Proposal...A man offers a woman a million dollars to sleep with him and she says, "Sure!" thinking what she could do with a million bucks.
Well, they go back to her place, and when they're done, he throws a five dollar bill on the nightstand. She yells, "Five bucks?! I'm not a whore!" And he replies, "I think we've already established that you are."

I think you could apply that story to so many situations in life - our willingness to compromise for the right price. My ex-husband lives about 45 minutes away and one Friday night he was supposed to drive to my house to pick up the girls for the weekend. He did not want to fight traffic and asked me to drive them out instead. I had plans that night and since his house is down the same highway that leads to the mountains, Vegas, the river, basically everywhere a southern Californian may want to escape for the weekend, there was no way I was going to engage in a three hour round trip as a favor to him. Finally he said, "I will give you $500 if you drive the girls out here right now."..................DONE!!! Does that make me a driving whore? I don't care - I got five hundred bucks!! :)

In my new job I call on car dealers, specifically finance managers. I spent the entire day in the field yesterday visiting dealers who haven't sent us any business in the last few months, and trust me, I knew what I was doing. One dealer has only sent us one deal (worth about $9000) in the last several months because he hates our program and thinks we're too tight. I walked out of there with $100,000 worth of contracts (and a Mango-A-Go-Go Jamba Juice), and I know it was directly proportional to the length of my skirt - trust me, our program hasn't changed. At another dealer I got several contracts, lunch, and my car washed. How funny is that? When I go out in the field, I'm usually out until 7 or 8 at night, yet I know it's not my hard work or diligence that's earning me these contracts. It's the skirt. It's the ability to sit there and pretend to be flattered and laugh at their jokes. Again - I don't even care! I got a sweet bonus last month and if things keep going well, I'll get an even sweeter one this month.

Today is our company golf tournament and we invited our favorite dealers. There are so many that I think would be really fun to hang out with and we were sure to invite all of them. So my partner and I get a chance to spoil them with our self-stocked beer cart, and we get to see them in a more social environment. I'm really looking forward to it. I was planning on taking about a case of beer and maybe the makings of my killer apple martinis, but my boss just called to tell me that someone else is taking four cases of beer for her dealers? FOUR? I only invited eight people and I'm pretty sure two of them don't drink. This should be good....hopefully I'll have some great stories tomorrow....and the time to actually write about them!